Heritage Languages and their Speakers (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Series Number 159)

This Book Provides A Pioneering Introduction To Heritage Languages And Their Speakers, Written By One Of The Founders Of This New Field. Using Examples From A Wide Range Of Languages, It Covers All The Main Components Of Grammar, Including Phonetics And Phonology, Morphology And Morphosyntax, Semantics And Pragmatics, And Shows Easy Familiarity With Approaches Ranging From Formal Grammar To Typology, From Sociolinguistics To Child Language Acquisition And Other Relevant Aspects Of Psycholinguistics. The Book Offers Analysis Of Resilient And Vulnerable Domains In Heritage Languages, With A Special Emphasis On Recurrent Structural Properties That Occur Across Multiple Heritage Languages. It Is Explicit About Instances Where, Based On Our Current Knowledge, We Are Unable To Reach A Clear Decision On A Particular Claim Or Analytical Point, And Therefore Provides A Much-needed Resource For Future Research. Maria Polinsky (university Of Maryland, College Park, Md). Includes Bibliographical References (pages 354-404) And Index. Cover 1 Half-title page 3 Series page 4 Title page 7 Copyright page 8 Dedication 9 Contents 11 Preface 15 Acknowledgments 21 List of Abbreviations 23 1 Who Are These Speakers, Where Do They Come From, and How Did They Get to Be the Way They Are? 25 1.1 Setting the Stage 25 1.2 The Main Players 33 1.2.1 Heritage Language Speakers 33 1.2.2 Baseline Speakers 34 1.2.3 Homeland Speakers 37 1.3 Main Outcomes in Heritage Grammars 41 1.3.1 Transfer from the Dominant Language 42 1.3.2 Attrition 46 1.3.3 Divergent Attainment 48 1.4 Main Sources of Divergence in Heritage Grammars 52 1.4.1 Amount and Type of Input 53 1.4.2 Incipient Changes in the Input 57 1.4.3 Resource Constraints 59 1.4.4 Universal Principles of Language Structure 60 2 Heritage English 62 2.1 Prologue 62 2.2 Heritage English: Historical Records 67 2.3 Heritage English: Current Production Data 70 2.3.1 Some Statistics 71 2.3.2 Changes in Morphology 73 2.3.3 Fillers 74 2.3.4 Verb–Particle Combinations 76 2.3.5 Relative Clauses 82 2.3.6 What They Get Right 84 2.4 Linguistic Properties of Heritage English: Comprehension Data 89 2.4.1 Processing Limitations 90 2.4.2 Beyond Processing Limitations 93 2.5 Summary 97 3 How to Study Heritage Speakers:: Observations on Methodologies and Approaches 100 3.1 General Remarks 100 3.2 Methodological Considerations Specific to Heritage Populations 102 3.2.1 Choice of Production Tasks 102 3.2.2 The Production–Comprehension Divide 110 3.2.3 Use of Grammaticality Judgment Tasks 119 3.3 Assessment Methodologies 125 3.3.1 Biographic and Demographic Questionnaires 126 3.3.2 Linguistic Assessment of Heritage Speakers 129 4 Phonetics and Phonology 138 4.1 “Heritage Accent” 140 4.2 Production in the Heritage Language: Segments 147 4.3 Production in the Dominant Language: Segments 162 4.4 Production: Tone, Stress, and Prosody 171 4.5 Perception: Segmental Phonology 177 4.6 Perception: Tone, Stress, and Prosody 182 4.7 Summary 186 5 Morphology and Morphosyntax 188 5.1 The Fate of Paradigms 189 5.1.1 Salience 189 5.1.2 Overregularization and Overmarking 197 5.1.3 Increased Analyticity 207 5.2 Structural Indeterminacy and Ambiguity 208 5.2.1 Production Data 208 5.2.2 Restructuring of Featural Oppositions 211 5.3 Morphology Encoding Relationships between Two Constituents 221 5.3.1 Case Marking 221 5.3.2 Agreement 228 5.3.3 What About Isolating Languages? 239 5.4 Summary 243 6 Syntax 246 6.1 Some Things Never Change? Parts of Speech 247 6.2 A-Dependencies 254 6.2.1 Unaccusativity 254 6.2.2 Other A-Dependencies 260 6.3 Beyond A-Dependency: Other Valency Alternations 262 6.4 A-Bar Dependencies 265 6.4.1 Relative Clauses: Production 265 6.4.2 Relative Clauses: Comprehension 268 6.4.3 Other A-Bar Dependencies 272 6.5 The Silent Problem 277 6.5.1 Referential Pronouns: General Remarks 277 6.5.2 Referential Pronouns: An Example 284 6.5.3 Bound Variables 285 6.5.4 Ellipsis 287 6.6 Binding 294 6.7 Word Order 297 6.7.1 General Considerations 297 6.7.2 Ignore Morphology, Alter Your Word Order 299 6.7.3 Discontinuous Relationships between Elements of Structure 301 6.7.4 Germanic Languages in Contact: Changes in V2 305 6.8 Transfer Effects? 310 6.9 Summary 312 7 Semantics and Pragmatics 315 7.1 Lexical Systems and Word Meaning 316 7.2 Propositional Semantics 322 7.2.1 Genericity, Specificity, Definiteness 322 7.2.2 Scope 328 7.3 Information Structure and Pragmatics 334 7.3.1 Topic 334 7.3.2 Focus 340 7.4 Social Pragmatics 347 7.5 Summary 351 8 Heritage Languages and Their Speakers in Unexpected Places 353 8.1 Preliminary Remarks 353 8.2 Heritage Speakers among Endangered Language Speakers? 357 8.2.1 Biographical Data 357 8.2.2 Structural Signs of Endangerment 358 8.2.3 Variation in Judgments 369 8.3 Coping Strategies 370 Conclusions 373 References 378 General Index 429 Language Index 432 A pioneering introduction to heritage languages that covers all the main components of grammar and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, and from sociolinguistics to psycholinguistics. Written by a leading scholar in the study of heritage languages, it is the foundational book on the subject. 1. Introduction 2. Heritage English 3. How to study heritage speakers: some observations on the methodologies and approaches 4. Phonetics and phonology 5. Morphology and morphosyntax 6. Syntax 7. Semantics and pragmatics 8. Heritage speakers in unexpected places Conclusions.